Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Wadi Cherith
Thin water ripples on the shingle,
shatters the sun, yellow sparkling
swells slap the dark strand and vanish
drawn into the desert heart.

You sit in the shadow of the overhang
and wait the word from on high
that tells you the mission has begun,
the time has at last rolled round
to begin whatever God has planned.

Had you known then of the prophets
of Ba'al, had you seen the challenge
of Ahab, had you seen the night cave
where you heard the sounds of God,
would you have fled? Running through
the desert like another madman,
another who would come to bathe
in the Jordan and cause others also
to be made clean.

And like another
who also would feed the hungry
with endless food from nothing?
What would you have done?

Isn't it better this way, alone
in the desert fed by carrion birds
and resting in the shade?
Better the silence of God
sometimes than His speech.

Hear His Voice

I have heard His Word as spoken earlyin the day. I have followed in His Wayas He says stay, wait awhile with me. See!I am God indeed, the very seed from which springs life, all earthly things that sing Hisblessed name, that same name that seals open lips with His seal and the real song that broughtforth all that is is heard. His name is made holy when all creation, fallen andredeemed intones as one, at once a loneand plural voice, calling to all--Rejoice!

You have heard, but have you listened? The taleof the stork clatters out against the darkpurple of the evening, and this noise marksthe start of the tale. You listen but fail to make sense of the story. The pond andthe wood are too distant, too alien--the words cannot make sense. You see God's handin the lowering night, and wonder whenthe Word He sends can be heard and heededby you, by those around you. You don't knowwhy the heron and wren know what's needed,and men are so reluctant and so slowto understand--the evening and the nightthe stars, the moon-- all God's created thingsRejoice with a great glad noise, without shame,Man alone pines, mourns, walks as though he's lame,Til one Man returns to teach him to sing.

Ascension"Arise, alight, away, I must go
to help you. When here, I am hampered
by my presence, a single person
bound by body to a time and a place.

"And yet, I must be for all in eternity,
and as I arise, the light that is
love, unwinds for all who have a heart.

"This trace is more than a promise
its is everything that I make real,
wrenching it from oblivion and outer
darkness, damned by its own refusal to see

this light slashes through the deeper dark. "

II

When fleeing Pharaoh across fierce sands
they received a fiery funnel by night
and dust by day, that gave them life
and light and hope, the surety of safety
from archer and enemy, slaver and slayer--
they walked in perfect peace.
The train from God's temple had
slipped down to surround them, isolate
them as chosen children, people of the promise
saved and assured, the fruit of the firstborn,
destined to bring Him back again.

So when He ascended that train from the temple
dropped down again, and twined around us--
the certainty of salvation and safety in His shade.

From Chopin you drew
your own breath, four sharps
you say, and your fingers
travel up and down the keyboard.
Days of work, days of revision
and now your own waltz
that speaks the way music
speaks to you.

What at last do you look at?
At pages of a book
spread open before
you, looked at not
read, the plowed field
look of black type
running on rows of white
ready to mean at any
time you would give it
attention.

Browsing through a stack
of journals:
a lump of dry poison
would be more palatable
than another syllable
of what I wrote
then and thought wonderful
and profound
but I could receive
no instruction
and still cannot.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Another beach I have not seen on a thread-thin barrier island that connects Bonita Beach to Fort Myers and Sanibel.

Ukiyo-e VI--The God-Shaped Hole

I got back to filling the God-shaped hole today. I can't tell you what a nuisance it has been, what with people and things falling in all the time. Last week two vintage Ferraris, the week before my mother and my aunt. And the hole keeps growing.

When I first found it, a smoldering pit in the middle of my best field, I called the fire department and paid to have sea-water helicoptered in to fill it. Thought perhaps I could make a pond of it. But the water just kept on running and the hole got no fuller and no cooler.

So then I realized that I needed to line it. Started with quikcrete and figured I cover it with gunite smooth it out and line it with white Carrera marble, from that quarry that gave us David and Moses. It's a good thing I'm a man of means because six million cubic yards of quikcrete later and still no sign of an end.

If I couldn't fill it up, perhaps I could cover it over. That's what we're trying today. Three different ways. I figured I could span it with chicken wire and then plaster it over. When that's done, we'll drape it with crêpe de chîne and silk streamers--make it at kind of neo-Cristo pavilion type experience.

So we'll see. One way or the other, we'll find a way to fill it. With rocks and sand, with books and paper, with long dark alcoholic nights, with prada shoes and Givenchy and Chanel, with polo clubs and yachts, with coq au vin and curry poulet vindaloo with a Dom Perignon '65, with Picasso and Matisse and Gaugin and Brancusi. Cover it up, fill it in, one way or another we'll close that gap and I'll feel whole again, my perfect field restored.

AThe eye of Horus, huge and blank and blue stares down at me from between two banks of cloud-blanched sky. The eye of the son of the sun reminds me just in time that providence rewards the wise eye and I tap on my brakes to avoid the bumper of the car driving free-form in planck-space.

Waiting now in the slow-crawl-stop of the turn lane. Trees, wires, telephone poles, ibis-necked street lamps transform the eye from merely blank to baleful or beautiful. I make my turn.

B

Have you ever stood connected to the sky watching the convecting clouds? The boundless yearning upward surge, the penetration of deepest blue by rising white. The cloud cap expands and then subsides, vanishing entirely into the growing bank.

You expected the water to be blue, but nothing had prepared you for this shade. You had expected sapphire but had no idea that the sun off the sand in the shallows yields turquoise. In fact, when you first see it it is so gorgeous you're certain that only terrible chemical pollution could have resulted in such a color.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

The world changed that day when the white rock shiftedand became the small shell of a turbanedsnail, harsh in sunlight against the red brick.

[040108]

I shifted a number of things in this poem to bring the sounds more into conformance with the flow I was hearing and to bring shell and harsh together. Additionally, as with any poetry, it is trimmed now to a near-minimum, though there may be more to shape and shift. I'm still not satisfied, but it is a much clearer picture of the event and the day. It's flow is now more reminiscent of both Japanese and Chinese progenitors and some of the American/English Imagist school.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Long ago, this chuckling water flowedstraight over the plain, seeking its levelin the sea. It danced and played in its banks,it jumped and tumbled in its rough channel.So it should have flowed, straight and true, through timebut rough water holds its own mind, obeys its own rules. And so the curling tumblesshocked the rock and mudsteeped banks into new,unknown shapes. And so the straight line flow plowed its way into channels shaped by wayward yearnings and wanderings, still swift and coolrunning yet headlong, following now notjust its own way, but the way it had shaped.No longer the true straight path that runs soswiftly to its close, now bending, windingturning in churning pools that roil nowhere,pools that spin and turn and cut and shape, changeto no end but that the water might moveand keep moving, now more slowly than it had ever done. Still the wayward currentsshape and change the bank and channel, bendingever more from the straight and true start. Doeswater have thoughts? Regrets? Does water knowits past? Do the fingerling currents feelfor the grip that they knew in the straight true days? If so, to what end? The bank has changed--the water runs quietly, quickly movingeven more slowly. But the old power is there, strong even in the slowness, nowrenewed by a surge of spring, a summerthunderstorm jolt. It cuts away, changesits own changes endlessly. At the end it travels ten times its length to arrive,to merge with the ocean.

Consider thisas a stream--the frustration of being there,seeing the sea-glint, the sun-spot that marks the rampant waves, surging forward to findyour course suddenly changed. You cannot getthere from here and the sad thing is you madethis place yourself. Longing for reunionwith its ocean birthplace, the stream winds in banksof its own making. The water here might never reach the great salt, it might simplyvanish, drawn into oblivion, skywardreaching only to condense, a cloud orless, drops falling even further away.

But one spring the silver winter sun-warmedthaws into a flood and strikes downstream--ragein water--passion throwing banks aside. The graceful surge, the fresh tide, forces banksto bend, rock to sway and break, and what wasan age of swerving away and back, nowbecomes a breakneck flash, a raging white that plunges to its end, its shape reformed by sun and snow and surge and sea-longing.

The straightaway leaves stranded crescent lakescarved scars that pock the land surface besidethe silverstream that freed from itself, flowsswiftly jumping joyful to join the sea--the birthplace and the end. Where it beganwhere now it slows and mingles with the salt and never loses shimmer, glint, and light.

In the mix and muddle of events
it's often hard to see and say what
seems to be the truth; instead we stand
aghast and gaping at what we cannot
change. We seek inside asylum,
a solace, a sweet peace
to spread like a thick blanket
that offers no warmth, but a harsh
security--a shell against the shocks
that strike at who we are.

Did you say yes?
I wasn't listening
or perhaps I didn't hear.
And did I even want
a yes? What was the
question that caught us up
in so much thought--
fever-frothed discussion--
it must have meant
something when I asked.
And now where are we?
What was said?
Is everything new again?

Fickle food--
its flavors fade
and all that's left
is what weighs
me down.

[081610-2//052409-1]

I recall a story about a famous poet or short story writer (was it Oscar Wilde) who, after working all morning on his most recent work emerged triumphantly at lunch to announce that the morning had been fruitful, he had taken a comma out. After luncheon he returned to five hours of afternoon work. He emerged, again triumphantly to announce that he had replaced the comma withdrawn at noon.

This poem is something like that--the triumph of a day of wrestling with it--the insertion of a punctuation mark.

Friday, August 13, 2010

This one needs work, but I'm going to post it raw and work on it here. Maybe people will come and watch the poet through the glass window--whaddayathink? No, I didn't really think so either.

The Road Well Rutted

We travel as we travel; at the end
we are surprised to arrive at a place
we never thought to visit; and then, when
we glance at the map, we see empty space--
Terra incognita, here be monsters.
The road we have worn, worn to uselessness,
has guided us here, and made us wonder
why we chose, a barren path to endless
waste. Truth is, we don't see so well down here
beneath the level of the land. Once we
had bearings, could see the landmarks, over there
the pine barrens that guard the dunes and sea,
over here the road to the city, winding
strange and imperfect through the lonely miles.
But we walk the same old ground, now tramping
down the earth, back and forth, restless now while
we still can see, and becoming at home
as we obscure our vision. Sightless we
see what we always wanted to see, tombs
become palaces, walls-windows, we see
what we dreamed only dimmer, until all
light goes out. The well-rutted road now falls
away, and we are left with appalling
signs of how foolish we have been--how small.

Yes, believe it or not, an idea from one of his stories--"In the Walls of Eryx"

A Condo in Eryx

Glass tunnel in a wide
open field, perfectly
clear so I cannot see
the prison maze that binds
me to my choices. I
make these walls, no one can
see me here, no one wants
to. In time I could die
here, out in the open
unseen, unmourned, unknown,
unneeded, and alone;
but until then, I build,
making walls with the fierce
determination shown
by colonies of ants--
labyrinthine, involute,
spiraling, in and out
but always ending in
hollow chambers, the lair
of the Queen, the meaning
of the colony. And
so, lacking a queen, this
endless building tends to
end--bloated nothingness.

Look at the handthat holds the pen or floats over keyboardas though not attached to your humanity.Ghost pale in glowing light, flex it, fingersmove in ways at once simple, beautiful,light, impossible. Who would have thought such a stretch was mere bone in flesh and not the puremotion of the divine?

What better pointer

to what isbeyond motion? No sign you can see

shows at the surface of skin, and yet it movesthe hand, powered by a stream of humancurrent, the shocks and jolts of nerveimpulses across a chemical sea--a distance so vast and so perfectlyspaced that everything moves together, so a jazz-hand dancer, then a fist, then what?Whatever the hand has been trained to do,whenever it has been shown to move--allmotion not its own.

The narrow way betweenthe Oyster House and the Bell-in-Handis paved with cobbles that knewand shaped the first streets here.

I step on the same stones that borethe weight of independence; thatcarried those who plannedto tan the sea with British tea.

And in the misty too-cool evening it is easy to see thatthey walk here still--that what we are and what we have was given to usfrom the hands of ghostswho linger here to remind usof the meaning that is beyond us.

As a fragile breath
Your word is given
As a clay vase
Your love shapes us.

Your word is a murmur
Like love's secret
Your word is a wound
That opens our day.

Your word is birth
As when one leaves prison
Your word is the seed
That promises the harvest.

Your word is sharing
as cutting the bread
You word is a movement
that shows us a road.

Looking to see if the title of the previous had been taken, I stumbled across this poem and for a moment my breath was taken away. I know nothing of the poet, and I realize that my own translation is too literal and too close to the original--too crude. But I hope it gives a little sense of the beauty that captured me as I stumbled through my morning routine.